The White House has forcefully stepped into the burgeoning debate in the GOP-led House of Representatives to condemn a proposal to limit the National Security Agency’s surreptitious collection of telephone calling data on millions of ordinary Americans who have no known ties to terrorism.

In a statement issued hours before a scheduled House debate on the issue, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the Obama administration opposes “the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community’s counter-terrorism tools.”

Carney said a proposal to end NSA’s authority to gather so-called telephony meta-data from telephone carriers was a “blunt approach” that was “not the produkct of an informed, open or deliberative process.”

The looming debate today underscores the breadth of concern among conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats over the long-secret surveillance that came to public attention as a result of disclosures by fugitive NSA leader Edward Snowden.

The collection approved in secret by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court enables the NSA to map links between called numbers and trace possible links to terrorists.

The House is preparing to weigh two amendments affecting NSA data collection as part of legislation to spend $598.2 billion for the Pentagon for the fiscal year beginning October 1.

The fact that the House Rules Committee cleared the way for House floor debate on two such politically-charged proposals underscores the breadth of concern that forced House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, to permit the debate.

Congressman Rich Nugent, a Republican from Florida, has proposed an amendment that would prohibit NSA from using any of its 2014 budget to “target a U.S. person or acquire and store the content of a U.S. person’s communications, including phone calls and e-mails.”

A second measure — proposed by Michigan Republican Congressman Justin Amash with the support of liberal Democratic Congressman John Conyers — would end authority for NSA to collect telephone calling records that pertain to individuals who are not the target of a counter-terrorism investigation.

A Texas member of Congress told Hearst Newspapers and the Houston Chronicle that the House threats to circumscribe NSA surveillance had “spooked” the Obama administration.

The response? Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, has been dispatched to Capitol Hill for back-to-back, closed-door briefings for House Republicans and House Democrats on NSA’s need for the program.

A second member of the Texas congressional delegation said the Obama administration had offered members of Congress so-called “talking points” on behalf of continued NSA surveillance so that lawmakers would have NSA’s justifications at the ready when they return home to their congressional districts in August for the season of town-hall meetings with constituents.

The House is moving ahead amid criticism by the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, issued a statement saying it “would be unwise” for lawmakers to offer “any amendments to defund the program on appropriations bills.”

Decisions over changes to the program ought to be left with congressional committees and congressional legislation that authorize federal policy rather than federal spending, the senators said.

The proposals before the House may or may not survive a vote by the full House. But the mere fact that the measures reached the floor and were debated is expected to serve as a warning shot across NSA’s bow, bringing about changes within the controversial surveillance program in an attempt to allay congressional concern.